Part 2 Non Network Ads
Sponsorships
Sponsorships are advertising relationships built directly between the blogger and the advertiser. There is no middle man and hence, the blogger gets 100% control and revenue.
As your blog becomes bigger and more influential, advertisers might find you or you might join one of the larger blogging networks in which case you will have ad reps actively seeking sponsors for you. Otherwise, you are left to approach advertisers who lie within your niche and work out all the details.
Obviously, the more tightly focused your niche is, the better you will do with sponsorships. If your niche is running and your blog is not huge, chances are you won’t get sponsored by Nike or Adidas, but if your blog is focused on trail running in Ogden, Utah and you have a small but dedicated following, the chances are pretty good that you will be able to sell a sponsorship to a trail running shop in Ogden or Salt Lake City.
Sponsorships can be through text links, banners, reviews, or any other form you can think of that the sponsor likes.
Affiliate Programs
An affiliate program works like this. You refer a reader to a product or service. They purchase the product or service. The product or service gives you a small percentage of their profit.
Amazon is definitely the most well known affiliate program. Amazon affiliates sell just about anything you can imagine.
Like the Kindle:
Then there are Affiliate conglomerates like Clickbank and Commission Junction which represent hundreds of independent companies under one banner. The advantage here is that you only need to sign up for one account and you can then sell all of the products or brands they represent.
Affiliate bloggers work much harder than I like to, but they also tend to make more money than I do. If you want to be successful with affiliate marketing, you need to have an intensely focused niche blog and pair it to exactly the right affiliate program.
My recommendation is to do your homework before jumping into the vast ocean of affiliate marketing. Again, there are many books on finding success with affiliates, man of which can be found at Free-Ebooks.biz
Blog Flipping
More and more you see people creating a quality blog and then selling it. There are a few bloggers (very few) who have made millions doing this. Weblogs Inc was sold for $25 million. Don’t expect that to happen to you though.
The reality is that there are blog buyers out there ready to buy your blog if it meets a few important criteria.
1) Generating income
2) High page ranking
3) Heavy traffic
Buyers will usually pay between 6 months to 2 years advance revenue. You can expect to find an easier sale on the 6 month end of things. I’ve sold a few blogs and find that usually I can expect 9 months to one year’s worth of revenue. So if your blog is making a solid $100 a month, you can expect to get between $900 – $1200 unless you’ve got other factors like high page rank, high volume traffic, a super hot niche, or a really cool domain name.
Blogs are being sold everyday at places like eBay, GoDaddy auctions, Sitepoint forums, and Flippa. In my experience, eBay is the worst place to sell a blog or domain as users are less likely to appreciate the finer points of your blog. If you list a blog on eBay, don’t be surprised if it goes for your start price or not at all. So set your price accordingly.
Currently there is a lot of hype about the opportunities for blog flippers, but I don’t buy it. Unless you are either really good or really lucky, chances are you will end up getting about $1 for each hour you’ve put into your blog. In my opinion, you are better off spending the time to learn to monetize first, building an income, and then you might actually be able to get out of your blog what you’ve put into it, but then, if it is producing a good, soft income, why would you want to get rid of it?
Donations
In five years of blogging, I’ve made about $100 in donations. Unless you have a compelling reason why readers should give you their money, don’t expect them to give it to you. Ask yourself, when is the last time you donated money to a blog, a piece of free-ware, or a developer? If you ever have, try to figure out why you did and you might be on to a way of having your readers do the same.
Selling Stuff
I think this is the best way to make money from your blog. The hard part is figuring out what you have to sell that your readers will want to buy. If you have a well read travel blog, your readers might be into buying your guidebooks. If you have a really cool logo, you might be able to find a degree of success selling shirts or merchandise through a program such as Cafepress.
I have one friend who ran a political blog in the early 2000?s that managed to make a couple of thousand dollars selling novelty butt-plugs (yes, butt-plugs) shaped like President Bush. He thought he would make millions, but (and I could have told him this) most people have no desire to own such a thing though his website did go viral and get millions of hits. Unfortunately for him, he was so sure he would make millions on his product that he didn’t have any CPC, impression, or affiliate ads running on his site and thus missed out on what could have been a good chunk of change, probably more than he made from his products.
Subscriptions
Almost every major media outlet provides free content on the web. Are you sure that yours has such a high demand that people will pay for it?
What is to stop someone else from stepping in and providing a similar blog for free as soon as you announce you are charging? Oops. There goes your readership, revenue, and traffic. I think this is a non-option. If you’ve made it work though, I would love to hear about it in the comments below.
One success story I know of is my friend Tanya who put together a blog listing all the cruise ship jobs. Apparently her reputation was solid enough and she had a loyal enough following that when she monetized in this way, it worked. Well, it worked for a while. Before too long she was forced to create a free content site that offered limited information in order to keep her competitors from knocking her out of the water (pun intended).
Create a Blog Network
You and all of your blogger friends decide that you will create a co-op of sorts. You pool all of your traffic and site data together and offer to sell ads to advertisers over the whole network rather than on a single blog. Think about it, as an advertiser would you rather advertise on one blog with 2000 readers a day or on a network of 10 blogs with 20,000 readers a day. Obvious, right?
The hard part as in any joint venture is finding the right people to work with and figuring out all of the technical deals, profit shares , and more. It can work, but I’ve seen several networks start with high hopes and then crash and burn. In a few cases, promising blogs were destroyed and friendships were lost. So, be careful.
Another option is to contract out as a writer for an existing network. You can find plenty of ‘Blogger wanted’ ads over at ProBlogger.com